Revised African History

Introduction The aim of this paper is to examine the relationship, if there is any, between the educational and economic policies of the European powers in colonial West Africa. Hence, it is crucial to give a vivid picture of how West African territories were divided among the various colonial powers. By the end of the First World War, the British and the French, who had strengthen their dominant position in West Africa by sharing the former German territories of Togo and the Cameroons, could claim to be in effective control of their territories in the area. [1] Therefore, Britain controlled the Gambia, Sierra Leone, Ghana and Nigeria throughout the colonial era, while France unified Senegal, Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin, Ivory Coast, and Niger into French West Africa. With effective colonial rule established and West African societies falling under one colonial power or the other, different policies ranging from political, administrative, economic and social among others we...

Introduction This paper intends to bring to fore the relationship between the past and present in history as a field of academic discipline. Hence, it will take a brief survey into the definitions of history, relevance of the past to historical studies, concise discussion of the intimacy between the past and present in historical analysis and finally conclusion. Definition of History The word “history” is derived from the Greek noun “historia” meaning “inquiry or research”. [1] Learning by inquiry about the past of mankind was developed into a discipline by the Greek historians Thucydides and Herodotus (who is popularly known as “father of history”). [2] Aristotle regarded history as a systematic account of a set of natural phenomena, whether or not chronological ordering was a factor in the account. [3] E.H. Carr also defined history as a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, which can be interpreted as an “unending dialogue between the prese...